


In Through the Out Door

by Cards_Slash



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Smith/Wesson, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 17:20:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10223282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: They could have gone on forever, maybe, cracking apart in the gilded cage: holding lunch meetings and fist fights and lighting the building on fire.  There were no consequences here, no reason to find remorse or reason—they would have lost their minds, and given over their souls in the end.  Maybe a few years, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred, but it would have come and the angels had nothing but time to waste for them.But then there was him, some new hotshot installed into the office to the left, dressed in suits so well tailored to his body they seemed to be in some constant obscene embrace around his thighs and chest.





	

**Author's Note:**

> written for a friend on LJ, reposted from 2013

They were not, despite the water cooler talk, an ‘office romance’. 

\--

The whole thing started when Dean went off and had the unfortunate luck of being born. Or maybe, really, the problem started when Sam was born because before Sammy came around, Dean’s life wasn’t quite the same clusterfuck. And it’s not like regrets having Sam as his brother because he doesn’t. It’s just that they were a matched set and that was where the problem really started.

\--

First, he was disoriented, caught up in the game, completely enthralled by the new life he was given. He went along with the plot, he said all the lines, and then, like the steady flame of a salt-and-burn job, he figured it out. They weren’t Dean Smith and Sam Wesson (oh, those clever fucking angels must have been shitting themselves with their own impressive wit), they were Sam and Dean Winchester and they were trapped in an infinite loop.

\--

The small talk was the only thing that evolved, the only change in the constant. Sam quit once a day—in a truly spectacular display of childish anger, all rage and temper let loose. Once and a while, when Dean wasn’t too busy doing nothing at all, he went down to the dredges of the company’s lower floors to start a fist fight with Sam just for the old fashion normalcy of it. But most of the time, before Sam burst into furious cursing and inexplicable violence, they spent the morning in his office throwing things at one another, talking about how long they would have to hold out.

\--

Matilda, his secretary, thought he was fucking Sam. She gave him knowing winks whenever he asked her to call Sam and ask him to come up to his office. Dean couldn’t imagine what twisted version of the truth the angels put into her head, and he didn’t try. But even if he explained that they were brothers, the morning sun erased her memory all over again.

\--

Dean was breaking down in pieces, gagging under the suffocating weight of uselessness. Sam, tipsy, nerdy, useful Sam, told him that was how the angels were going to break them—here, where there no distractions and nothing to do. They were useless in this world, useless anywhere that the bright red of their blood and the tired old bruises of their life’s work were figures of speech slipping out at the water cooler and passed back and forth over after-work drinks. 

Dean’s scars were just as figurative, here in this world where his skin was perfect and his hair was silky and there was no burger juicy and dripping with fat enough to smear a little dirt on his knuckles and across his face. He was impossibly perfect the way Sam was painted pathetically mundane.

‘It’s what they want,’ Sam said on round six thousand of minesweeper, ‘they want us to break.’

\--

They could have gone on forever, maybe, cracking apart in the gilded cage: holding lunch meetings and fist fights and lighting the building on fire. There were no consequences here, no reason to find remorse or reason—they would have lost their minds, and given over their souls in the end. Maybe a few years, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred, but it would have come and the angels had nothing but time to waste for them.

\--

But then there was him, some new hotshot installed into the office to the left, dressed in suits so well tailored to his body they seemed to be in some constant obscene embrace around his thighs and chest. His eyes were the color of the sky that Dean could feel slipping away from his memory and his blunt-ended fingers were impeccable and polished but his fists were clenched in a death grip. They saw each other across their secretaries’ cubicles and there was a flickering-slip of recognition.

Sam showed up with blood flecks on his shirt and a bruise on his jaw with no explanation at all. They stopped caring a few weeks or months or years ago—these people were puppets, figments caught in a loop. Sam squinted at the newcomer with a cocked-head agitation.

‘Dean,’ he said (quietly, quickly).

‘Yeah,’ Dean agreed. But don’t-say-it because hope was the single most deadly weapon the angels had.

\--

It wasn’t a game of cat and mouse because Dean was neither pursuing nor evading the newcomer. His door was open and his windows were cracked from throwing paperweights at them for most of the morning, Sam was fashioning weapons of office supplies and using his paper opener as a throwing knife. They had searched for guns in the first days, squirreled away the best of the worst stash of weapon they could find. 

But the newcomer did not show his face until his brother was downstairs throwing a fit about his life and the incessant monotony of it. Dean heard the trickling-in rumors of a disturbance and ignored his secretary’s attempts to get him involved. His door was still wide open when the newcomer strolled in like he owned the place and cocked one perfectly-plucked eyebrow up with his arms hanging like dead weights at his side.

‘I think you know where we really are,’ the man said to him.

‘I think you can kiss my ass,’ Dean said, ‘because I’m not going to play this game—you want me? You come at me straight out because I’m through with the minor leagues.’ (The edge of desperation though, it was cutting through every single word: make-me-believe-you.)

‘I’m not the person that put you here,’ the man said. He had squinting-closed eyes, an agitated frown dragging at his lips and his hands shifting up to rest on his hips. ‘My name is James Kirk. I don’t know how I got here, but I need to get out.’

‘My name is kiss my ass,’ Dean said and then he was walking around the desk and shoving past the man, ‘and show yourself out.’

\--

But James Kirk was like an annoying itch, always present and just out of reach. He was dismantling the walls in the foyer of the top floor, taking apart the electrical panel in the elevator, pondering the computer in the cubicle next to Sam, talking to the microwave in the breakroom. He was flirting with the secretaries and hiding on the roof and caught sleeping on his desk, curled into a ball with his hand rest protectively on a baseball bat that Dean hadn’t found when he scoured the building for weapons.

Dean pelted him with pencils from a distance because he’d been raised by the type of person that slept with weapons in their hands and he knew the routine. ‘I’m not saying you’re not one of the douchebags, but if you’re serious about figuring a way out and you don’t want to ride my ass, we can work together.’

The man blinked at him, eyes wide and owlish and then he nodded his head. ‘What do you know about where we are?’

‘That there’s no way out.’ Because in the endless hours, days and months, that was all that they’d ever managed to figure out.

\--

Sam did the nerd talk with Jim, as he liked to be called, and they bumped their big heads together over blueprints of the building and the waning light of Sam’s computer screen until the early-morning hours when the light outside came in gray slants and Dean was sleeping face down on the couch.

\--

At the office, where they never did anything but wander around, Jim stuck with him. They were two suits ripping down walls, searching through files, opening up old doors that belched dust at them and sorting through the debris of this imagined prison.

‘How’d you get here?’ Dean asked when there was nothing to do but sit in place and contemplate the ordered-in food. He had a hundred bags of the finest and freshest food a person could order off a limitless credit card. 

Jim looked at home in the center of a feast, tie pulled apart and left hanging down his chest, buttons undone and hands picking through the Chinese he’d decided on and pulling out the slippery slime of too many onions. (As if there were such a thing.) ‘I went through the wrong door,’ Jim said. Like it could have been so simple. ‘I think they’ll find me, sooner or later.’

‘Sooner would be better.’

\--

Soon was not for a few days, or a few weeks or a few months. They made a habit of going home together, splitting beers and pizza at his impeccable table, shouting at the baseball game when it came on—watching the same late night thrillers and documentaries until they were going blind from boredom. Sam crashed in the early morning hours, sprawled out across the furniture with all the grace of a drunken moose, uncaring of the damage he did to his body because when they woke up, they’d all be back in their separate apartments no-worse-for the wear. 

Jim stood in his kitchen, fiddling with the tap water—all full of wonder and awe—until Dean found him. ‘Where are you from?’ Dean asked.

‘Nowhere near here,’ Jim said.

\--

There were time for distractions, Sam took up origami because he had a thousand sheets of paper, Dean tested out the internet search engines until he was sure that the angel douchebag in charge of making sure he never found anything wanted to have his balls on a fucking platter. And if anyone in this God-forsaken office actually cared about productivity they might have been clicking through his search history and finding things like ‘how do you escape a douchebag angel prison’.

But it was three months later, watching Jim through the open door of his office that he finally put in ‘who is Jim Kirk’ and the page came up blank. 

\--

There wasn’t a romance, though. It was more of a banding together for mutual survival. Sam was default, a subconscious imperative put into place by his father. Jim was an act of faith, maybe, something that he didn’t have a lot of and he refused to confess to having. But they were stuck together and Kirk was getting that pulled-apart look like he was going to shatter at the pressure points soon.

‘This is the best trap I’ve ever been caught in.’

‘It’s better if you don’t think about it,’ Dean said. He meant it too, ‘aren’t you supposed to be getting rescued?’

Jim shrugged, looked ragged and weak in a way that didn’t set right with the arrogance of his eyes and the twitching amusement of his lips. He was young, younger than Dean could ever remember being but there had been a kind of useful fire in his face just three-or-four days ago.

\--

Sam didn’t care much when Dean told him they were losing Jim. He was carrying an iron poker over his shoulder like a baseball bat, with sweat on his forehead and his hideous yellow shirt torn off and left behind on the lower floors. He was losing it—going over the edge—driven to the precipice by the normality that he’d spent all of his formative years searching for.

‘I thought this was your kind of thing,’ Dean said.

‘Not anymore,’ Sam mumbled, ‘this isn’t who I am now, it hasn’t been for a long time.’ But he was slipping away, all the same.

\--

‘What do you have to lose?’ Jim asked him over a game of poker they were playing with a deck of handmade cards. They were sitting in the doorway of the supply closet, causing a scene with the puppets as they fluttered and complained and chattered away with objections.

‘What do you mean?’

Jim shrugged, ‘you just seem like you’re trying really hard not to let go of something, like if you give an inch you’ll lose. I just like to know what I’m fighting against.’

‘Everything,’ Dean said. Because if the bastard was an angel he already knew and if he wasn’t, the truth was still the truth.

\--

Dean had never been a smoker but the looping infinity made him think there were worse things to do. Sam sat up on the roof with them, frowning out at the endless black specks of people below them milling around-and-around never-ever knowing they were going to blink out and back into existence at midnight. Jim joined in after a long pause, considered the cigarette after a few hacking coughs and made a face like there’d never been anything so wretched as this cigarette in all his life.

‘You do this often?’ Jim asked him. His skin pasted out gray and took another drag off the cigarette like he was certain it would bring a merciful end to this eternity.

‘No,’ Dean said, ‘I skipped over these and went straight to alcoholism.’

Sam snorted and sighed, scrapped up this-and-that pebbles and threw them off the side of the roof. ‘We could kill someone throwing rocks from this height,’ he said.

Jim’s eyes went slanting-thin and his smoke-twisted frown tightened down. Dean had seen the look on his face a hundred-thousand times before, that last fleeting moment before a man realized there was an unthinkable line that had to be crossed. But it slipped away and Jim tossed the cigarette down under his foot and stomped on it. ‘So how’d the two of you get stuck here?’

‘Angels,’ Sam said, ‘we’re on the wrong side of the apocalypse.’

\--

Second verse, same as the first. Dean was running up and down the hallways, working off the office flab (or so the secretaries seemed to think) because the boredom was sneaking in under his office door. It was creeping in at the edges of his mind in frequent flashbacks of hell. His every-fucking move was playing back in his mind like grainy specials on a motel TV. 

Jim watched him for a while, sitting on some secretary’s desk while she filed a sexual harassment suit with the office about Jim’s ass on her pile of daily work. He had a baseball endlessly tossed between his two hands and his bright-bright fucking blue eyes sightlessly. 

Sam came later, lazy and stilted, with his knuckles busted and his lip fattening up. His shoes were missing and his shirt was torn and the fire alarm was sounding like a shrieking opera singer being chased by Leatherface.

\--

Jim said, ‘so Sam’s your brother?’

And Dean couldn’t figure out why it mattered but he said, ‘yes.’ 

Jim frowned at that, a quick sly slick slip of his lips before he nodded his head and he turned around and was gone.

\--

The madness came by degrees, Sam caught it first and threw himself into it without restraint. He’d lost his empathy and embraced the carefree carelessness that came with it. He terrorized the building, level by level with ranting rampages, started fires and made bombs and tore the building to bits with his mindless rage.

Tick-tock, the clock struck midnight and it didn’t matter how many pieces they broke the puppets into, they came back together at 12:01.

\--

‘I’d rather not die before we figure out how to get out,’ Jim said to him, across the desk, with the curt civility of a man who was willing to do whatever it took. Maybe he’d been working it out in his head, maybe he hadn’t, but sooner or later he was going to figure out how to get rid of Sam.

\--

So it went like this, Dean found Sam at his desk early-early in the day, pulled him up by the collar and threw him back far enough to punch him in the face. They had a brawl, like the old days, like they had nothing to lose—they broke the desks and the computers and beat each other ragged and raw. Sam screamed at him, about everything, anything, all of the individual slights of his life. And Dean yelled back, broke open and poured out every-single-venomous thought he’d ever had.

‘I did everything for you,’ is what Dean said when he could hardly breath anymore.

Sam was slumped against the ground, bruised and bleeding with a broken arm and his face gone red and splotchy from pain. His chest was heaving-up and down-and he let his head slide back and hit the ground. ‘You should have left me dead,’ he said.

‘No,’ Dean said. And he crawled across the floor and grabbed Sam’s swelling-bruised-bleeding face and turned it to face him. He ran his thumb across the purpling-puff of the worst of the gashes he’d left with his fist and then slapped his cheek. ‘You’ll be fine.’

Sam groaned and punched him weakly in the side and they lay there panting and bleeding while the puppets ran in disorganized circles all around them.

\--

‘We’re losing Jim,’ Sam said three days later. He was coming back to civility, relearning how to live now. The edges of his madness were still raw and aching like the tense of his shoulders every time a puppet walked past. He was watching Jim breaking drywall with the battered old bat of his.

‘I think it’s your turn to take one for the team,’ Dean said.

Sam snorted, looked back at him, ‘he’s already made up his mind about me. It’s you that he’s not sure about.’

\--

Dean cornered Jim in the men's room. 

‘Look,’ Dean started to say but the words were cut off by a sharp slap against his shoulders and the abrupt stop of a wall against his back. Jim wasn’t exactly forthcoming with information but his tongue was pushing into Dean’s mouth like a man that was breaking apart at all the seams. His touch was hurried and harried and hurtful, ripping at Dean’s shirt, popping the buttons apart like bullets ricocheting off the wall. Jim’s teeth were blunt and hard against his throat and biting at his chest, his tongue was a brief murmured sorry against his pinking skin before moving down. ‘Wait,’ Dean mumbled.

His pants were being torn open, shoved down and Jim’s mouth slid across the bony prominence of his hip with a gasping breath. (Like any damn moment he was going to start cracking apart with sobs.) Jim was sucking his dick like it was his last grasp of sanity and Dean’s body (skin-and-bones from starvation) jerked into it reflexively.

No, but ‘Wait,’ Dean said. He dug his hands into Jim’s suit jacket, got his fingers under his arms and pulled him up to his feet again. It was hard to fight with no space between you but Jim was slapping and hitting at him until Dean shoved him against the wall and kissed him. They were fingernails-and-teeth, impatient shoving and grunting. 

\--

‘Look,’ Dean said after, when he was against the wall of the men’s room and Jim was laying on the floor, pants still open, stomach still bear, come drying on his skin. ‘I don’t know where you came from and I don’t know who you’ve got looking for you but I _swear_ that I’ll do everything I can to get you out.’

Jim rubbed both hands over his face and sighed. ‘You can’t even save yourself, what hope do you have at saving me?’

‘You’re different,’ Dean said, ‘you’re not supposed to be here.’

\--

Sam eyed him with a crooked grin and a pointed cough in his throat. Dean glared at him and threw himself into his office chair. 

‘Don’t—’ he started to say.

But Sam was already saying, ‘Better him than me.’

Dean glared at him.

But Sam just smiled at him. It was good though, to see him smile, to see the bit of the Sammy he’d grown up with sneaking back into the dullness of his eyes.

\--

Jim started hanging out with them, taking up space in Dean’s office and throwing back and forth ideas about where to look next. They’d cleared out all the levels of the building, gone through all the locked shut doors and had no better ideas. They’d broken apart their apartments, exhausted the limits of the imagined city they were living in. They’d gorged on every food they could try, watched the same movies over and over again, read every book in the book mobile and still they were sitting around his office, wearing smart suits and coming up empty.

‘Who’s coming to save you?’ Sam asked.

‘My crew,’ Jim said. His tie was pulled loose, hanging down from his neck, shirt buttons half-undone and hair tousled out of the gelled-back perfection of hours ago. ‘I don’t come from here, not from this time. I’m the Captain of the Enterprise—it’s a star ship and we were observing a planet and—it doesn’t matter but I had a choice to walk through one door or the other and I picked the wrong one.’

‘I’ve heard stranger,’ Dean said.

Sam was intrigued, full of a million and a half questions that he threw out for days-and-days-and days until he’d exhausted himself and Jim and Dean who was sick as fuck of listening to it.

\--

They didn’t talk about how they were never going to escape. They didn’t talk about what the others must think had happened to them. It was better to let it go, to mourn the dead and to keep moving because reality was a constant loop and they were going to lose in the end.

\--

Then there was sex. Dean wasn’t gay but he had a no fucking puppets policy and a no fucking Sam policy too so there was Jim who seemed to have no compunctions about same sex fucking. 

‘It’s not like I haven’t done this,’ Dean said when Jim was stripped down to sweaty skin and licking at his chapped lips. They were spread across the boss’s expensive fucking desk with Jim’s heals against the edge of it and his head lolling against polished cherry wood. His thighs were spread wide-open and his breath was a ragged-pant as his eyes rolled back in his head. His body was fucking _tight_ and Dean’s breath was getting short-and-shorter. 

He was two fingers deep and his dick was pulsing in a painful reminder of his hesitancy. ‘You’re so fucking tight,’ Dean said (and he didn’t even recognize his voice).

‘Fuck,’ Jim mumbled, he closed his eyes, mouth open and a groan rumbled out of him, vibrating all through his body and when he opened his eyes again they were blue-blue-blue and furious with _want_. His belly tightened up in rolls and he grabbed Dean by his shoulders to pull himself up to sitting. Jim’s mouth was wet and hot and hungry, biting and licking at his as he turned them around and shoved Dean flat against the desk. He climbed up after him, pale knees against cherry wood and one hand pressed hard against Dean’s chest just over his heart. His smile was sliding-sideways when he wrapped his fist around Dean’s dick and then sank down onto it.

Oh-shit, and his head went back and his body went still and for a minute he looked like he’d finally fucking found heaven and Dean couldn’t even _imagine_ and didn’t want to but oh-shit was that fucking-hot.

And then Jim tipped his head back down, thighs slipping open wider and he rolled forward, body sliding up and then pushing back down and Dean couldn’t _breathe_ while the little fucking grinned at him.

\--

Sam shook his head at him, eyebrows raised in concerned, bitch face in place, and offered him a tissue for no reason Dean could make sense of.

‘We’ve been missing out on so much,’ Dean said to him, like he was lost in a haze, ‘there’s so much more to sex than you can even imagine.’

‘We really have to get you out of here.’ But Sam was smiling at him, all the same.

\--

It wasn’t a romance, it was just fucking, in the bathroom and elevator and office, in the break room and hallways and anywhere else they felt the fucking urge. They fucked and ate the associates lunches out of the fridge and fucked again while the puppets shrieked in outrage. Jim worked him over again and again with a smile on his face and the edge of desperate leeching away.

It wasn’t a romance though.

\--

They were all sitting around, after hours, playing poker with bottle caps when the shivering-quaking-shake broke the wall in Jim’s office wide open. There was a distant snarl of voices and a hand reaching out through the whiteness. The fingers were green-tinted, the voices caught in a distortion and sounding more alien than the crap that Jim had gone on-and-on about with Sam. 

‘Spock?’ Jim said. He was jerking away, quick-running-steps across the floor to the hand and he was seconds from grabbing it when he stopped-turned back and looked at them. He looked at Spock’s hand and then back at them. 

‘Well go,’ Dean said, ‘you said they were coming for you.’

‘Come with me,’ Jim said. ‘I don’t know who’s got you here but I think we’ve figured out that you’re not getting out until you give in and I can’t promise that they won’t find you where I’m going but it’s a chance.’

Sam looked at him and Dean was set to say no but Sam tipped his head and didn’t say (we’re going to die here, we’re going to break and everything we fought for will be lost) but shrugged his shoulders and nodded his head toward Jim.

‘Sure,’ Dean said as he got up, ‘why not? Do they still have burgers in the future?’

Jim smiled at him and Dean reached out to grab his hand and reached back to grab Sam’s. ‘We’ve got food you haven’t even imagined yet,’ Jim promised him. And then he reached over and slapped his palm against Spock’s and they were sucked straight out of reality into the blinding whiteness beyond.


End file.
